While walking through the excellent little show of Jose Guadalupe Posada’s work at the Dallas Museum of Art—and by “little” I mean nothing derogatory, as it is simply a compact and intimate exhibition tucked into one of the quieter slots of the museum’s real estate—one can’t help wondering what Posada would be sending up if he were alive today.

Posada, who died in obscure poverty, was, in his early prime, a prolific printmaker of caustic Mexican socio-political illustration that accompanied the journalism of that country’s penny broadsheets around the turn of the last century. José Guadalupe Posada: The Birth of Mexican Modernism is a generous sampling of his work in its various themes and is a fascinating slice of the history of newspaper comic satire, with Posada claiming a special place in this genre for his innovation of a quick and dirty way to make detailed and expressive relief prints (nicely explained in this exhibition), thus keeping him churning out the work on pace with rapid social changes leading up to Mexico’s 1910 revolution.

Hombre con sombrero de copa (Man in Top Hat). Relief print, 9 1/2 x 6 5/16 in. (24.13 x 16.034 cm) Anonymous Loan

While his illustrations directly influenced legendary post-revolutionary fine-art greats such as Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, there’s also real satisfaction in knowing that the cartoon type of acerbic observation seems to transcend time, culture, and language. In Posada’s work I couldn’t help but see traces of our own era’s biting political cartoonists: Ralph Steadman, Robert Crumb, the team at Mad magazine, Doonesbury’s Gary Trudeau, and even the surrealism of Monty Python-era Terry Gilliam. Posada’s evocations don’t stop at political cartooning; his prints are surprisingly close in disposition to Goya, Ensor, and even Charles Dickens.

Posada’s set pieces are everyday people as well as outsized caricatures responding to (or creating) non-egalitarian circumstance, and he doesn’t hold back. Poverty, alcohol, willful neglect, mob rule, vanity, and massacre play out in his small frames, the horror vibrating out from a handful of square inches. Not to say that humor is banished; it’s simply woven into the scenes with a dark and knowing wink. The tone is familiar and in many ways incredibly reassuring. The need for humans to interpret pictorially all the social and political shenanigans thrust upon them is starting to look both endless and endlessly necessary.

While the old gem “A picture is worth a thousand words” applies perfectly to political cartooning, Posada is no exception. A smart illustrator sums up the nuances of a dire situation in a single frame—all the absurdity, rage, despair, and humanity intact and elegantly rendered–and in only a fraction of the space it takes a writer to spell it out. No matter how disposable they may seem the moment after they go to press (or, nowadays, hit the web), these images and their makers manage to tell the truth with breathtaking economy. Question: if Posada were around today, what would he make of Arizona? I’d love to know. Just a thought.

Main Image: Calavera carrancista (Carrancista Skeletons), 1889-1895. Relief print, 9 5/16 x 13 11/16 in. (23.654 x 34.766 cm) Anonymous Loan (All images courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art)